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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Heroes, Villains And the Invisible

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: June 15, 2012

It hardly needs to be said that any armed force has the potential for internal as well as external violence. But ''The Invisible War,'' Kirby Dick's incendiary documentary about the epidemic of rape within the United States military, is a shocking and infuriating indictment of widespread sexual attacks on women. Such behavior, the film argues, is tacitly condoned and routinely covered up; the victims are often blamed and their reputations destroyed.

This unsettling expos?which won the audience award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, may be the most outraged film in the annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which opened on Thursday and continues at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center through June 28. It is likely to fuel a growing perception of the military as a broken institution, stretched beyond its limits and steeped in a belligerent, hypermasculine mystique that has gone unchecked.

Last week the Pentagon reported that there had been 154 suicides among active-duty troops this year, a rate of nearly one a day. The rate is higher than that of military fatalities in Afghanistan, and it is another sign of incipient breakdown.

''The Invisible War'' is one of three festival films devoted to women's rights. The other categories in the festival, presented by Human Rights Watch and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, include Personal Testimony and Witnessing (four films); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender and Migrants' Rights (three films); Reporting in Crises (three films); and Health, Development and the Environment (three films).

In addition to villains, many of this year's films feature heroes who stand up to power and injustice. One hero, Ai Weiwei, is the dissident Chinese artist profiled in the official opening-night selection, ''Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.'' Directed by Alison Klayman, the movie covers three years in the life of Mr. Ai, a principal designer of the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Mr. Ai, an internationally celebrated artist, became an important political figure in China through blogging and via Twitter after he researched the deaths of several thousand schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He then created an artwork listing their names, which had been suppressed by the government.

Another of his best-known projects is a taunting series of photographs that show him making an obscene finger gesture in front of Tiananmen Square and other sites.

The film is less a career survey than an admiring political portrait of a stubborn dissident playing a risky cat-and-mouse game with the government. In 2011 Mr. Ai was finally detained. After spending three months in custody, he emerged unharmed but unwilling to answer questions about the experience.

Another hero, the Ugandan gay-rights activist David Kato, is the central figure of the closing-night film, ''Call Me Kuchu,'' directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall. Uganda is a notoriously homophobic country in which virulent antigay hatred -- ''Kuchu'' is derogatory slang for homosexual -- has been exploited by evangelical preachers visiting from the United States.

Mr. Kato and other gay-rights crusaders filed a lawsuit against a Ugandan newspaper, Rolling Stone (no connection to the American magazine), for publishing surreptitiously taken photos of gay men and lesbians, along with their names and addresses.

Mr. Kato was beaten to death with a hammer in January 2011. He had been leading the fight against legislation proposing the death penalty for H.I.V.-positive men and prison for anyone failing to turn in a known homosexual.

The heroes of Bernardo Ruiz's ''Reportero'' are the journalists for Zeta, a weekly newspaper founded in 1980 and published in Tijuana, Mexico. Its crusading spirit is personified by Sergio Haro, a craggy-faced reporter who risks his life every day investigating and exposing the connections between Mexico's drug cartels and public officials.

At least 74 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, including two editors of Zeta. The courage of Zeta writers, whose articles are now published under a collective byline for their protection, cannot be overestimated.

Still, none of the films I previewed matched the impact of ''The Invisible War,'' in which one woman after another describes her ordeal. The encounters they relate are violent assaults that inflict severe physical injuries and leave them with shattered psyches.

The military command structure is so inflexible that a victim can report a rape only to a commander, whose interest is to keep trouble to a minimum. In a significant number of cases that commander is either the accused rapist or a friend of the attacker's. Not all of the victims are women; two men also relate their stories.

The statistics are horrifying. More than 20 percent of women in the military have reported an assault, and less than 10 percent of cases are prosecuted. Kori Cioca, a former member of the Coast Guard, stands out as a cruelly treated victim of a surprise attack that dislocated her jaw and left her with post-traumatic stress disorder, for which the military refused to extend benefits.

Ms. Cioca was among the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed by victims of sexual assault in the military that was dismissed. As ''The Invisible War'' reports, the court viewed the possibility of rape as simply an occupational hazard.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs through June 28 at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center; filmlinc.com.